In a technologically advanced world where the electronic industry booms today, a diversity of hi-tech electronic products related to computers has been developed and introduced rapidly, which has made major breakthrough in the development of technology. As various current electronic technologies are improved constantly, performance of the computer systems has become stronger, but these computer systems are usually equipped with at least a hard disk. Regardless of whether the hard disk is equipped with the function of initializing the operating system thereof, every single hard disk has a master boot sector (which is stored in Cylinder 0, Head 0, Sector 1 of the hard disk according to the rule of the computer industry, and is the foremost sector of the hard disk), the content stored within the master boot sector is called the Master Boot Record (or MBR). The MBR includes a Jump Area, a MBR Boot Code Area, a Partition Table Area, and an End Area. The Jump Area contains the starting position of the MBR Boot Code Area of the designated hard disk; the Partition Table Area is where the partition tables are stored, and the partition tables contain the information about the partition status of the hard disk and data distribution, whereas the End Area signifies the end of the MBR (which is represented by two bytes; AA 55). When the hard disk is set to initiate a master hard disk under an operating system, a boot code within the MBR Boot Code Area is used to complete the initialization of the computer. As such, the computer system is allowed to access the important data and relevant parameters stored in the hard disk.
For the methods available for computers to protect the data of hard disk, a password-protected program is usually installed in an operating system in the master hard disk of the computer system (such as the OS administrator password). Before initiating the operating system, the computer will always execute the password-protected program, so that no one is allowed to enter the operating system unless the password-protected program has received the correct password. Subsequently, the computer is allowed to access the data of the hard disk by using the coding and decoding programs of the operating system; if the password-protected program does not receive the correct password, the computer cannot enter the operating system and access the data of hard disk, and thus the data of the hard disk is protected.
However, if the password recognized by the password-protected program is hacked or stolen, or if the hard disk of the computer system is stolen and directly installed into another computer and booted, the other computer can still access the data of the hard disk. The hard disk does not have any other protective measures at this stage, and the important data of the hard disk would be open to theft by anyone. In other words, the protection for current hard disks is not thorough enough, thus rendering the data security of current hard disks insufficient.